In this volume, the author argues that literacy is a complex combination of various skills, not just the ability to read and write: the technology of writing, the encoding and decoding of text symbols, the interpretation of meaning, the retrieval and display systems which organize how meaning is stored and memory. The book explores the relationship between literacy, orality and memory in classical antiquity, not only from the point of view of antiquity, but also from that of modern cognitive psychology. It examines the contemporary as well as the ancient debate about how the writing tools we possess interact and affect the product, why they should do so and how the tasks required of memory change and develop with literacy's increasing output and evoking technologies.
Liturgical papyri are prime witnesses to the history of liturgy and the religious and theological currents in late antique Egypt. These items from the third to ninth century preserve hundreds of Greek and Coptic hymns, prayers, and acclamations, most otherwise unknown but some still recited by the Coptic Church. Agnes T. Mihalyko offers the first extensive introduction to the liturgical papyri, facilitating the reader's access to them with a detailed inventory of edited manuscripts and an extensive discussion of their date and provenance. She also examines liturgical papyri as the first preserved liturgical manuscripts, describing their material features, the ways they were used, the early history of the liturgical books, and their languages. She reveals how liturgical texts were written down and transmitted and locates these important manuscripts in the book culture of late antique Egypt.
In Early Modern Europe the first readers of a book were not those who bought it. They were the scribes who copied the author’s or translator’s manuscript, the censors who licensed it, the publisher who decided to put this title in his catalogue, the copy editor who prepared the text for the press, divided it and added punctuation, the typesetters who composed the pages of the book, and the proof reader who corrected them. The author’s hand cannot be separated from the printers’ mind. This book is devoted to the process of publication of the works that framed their readers’ representations of the past or of the world. Linking cultural history, textual criticism and bibliographical studies, dealing with canonical works - like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s plays - as well as lesser known texts, Roger Chartier identifies the fundamental discontinuities that transformed the circulation of the written word between the invention of printing and the definition, three centuries later, of what we call 'literature'.
Annually published since 1930, the International bibliography of Historical Sciences (IBOHS) is an international bibliography of the most important historical monographs and periodical articles published throughout the world, which deal with history from the earliest to the most recent times. The works are arranged systematically according to period, region or historical discipline, and within this classification alphabetically. The bibliography contains a geographical index and indexes of persons and authors.
This volume investigates the form of love letters and erotic letters in Greek and Latin up to the 7th Century CE, encompassing both literary and documentary letters (the latter inscribed and on papyrus), and prose and poetry. The potential for, and utility of treating this large and diverse corpus as a ‘genre’ is examined. To this end, approaches from ancient literary criticism and modern theory of genre are made; mutual influences between the documentary and the literary form are sought; and origins in proto-epistolary poetic texts are examined. In order to examine the boundaries of a form, limit cases, which might have less claim to the label ‘love letter’, are compared with more c...
This is the first major study of the interplay between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in early medieval records. Building on previous work on the uses of the written word in the early Middle Ages, which has dispelled the myth that this was an age of ‘orality’, the contributions in this volume bring to the fore the crucial question of language choice in the documentary cultures of early medieval societies. Specifically, they examine the interactions between Latin and Germanic vernaculars in the Anglo-Saxon and eastern Frankish worlds and in neighbouring areas. The chapters are underpinned by an important comparative dimension on account of the two regions’ shared linguistic heritage and numerous cross-Channel links. Contributors are: Stefan Esders, Albert Fenton, Robert Gallagher, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Charles Insley, Kathryn A. Lowe, Rosamond McKitterick, Rory Naismith, Janet L. Nelson, Edward Roberts, Annina Seiler, Marco Stoffella, Francesca Tinti, Kate Wiles, Bernhard Zeller. See inside the book.
What does the term "reading" mean? Matthew Rubery's exploration of the influence neurodivergence has on the ways individuals read asks us to consider that there may be no one definition. This alternative history of reading tells the stories of "atypical" readers and the impact had on their lives by neurological conditions affecting their ability to make sense of the printed word: from dyslexia, hyperlexia, and alexia to synesthesia, hallucinations, and dementia. Rubery's focus on neurodiversity aims to transform our understanding of the very concept of reading. Drawing on personal testimonies gathered from literature, film, life writing, social media, medical case studies, and other sources ...
Ancient epistolary fiction is a still largely under-explored field of research, at the intersection of studies on epistolography and on pseudepigraphy. The present volume sketches out a broad panorama of ancient fiction in letters. It covers a large period of time up to late Antiquity, with a main focus on letters from the imperial era. Epistolary fiction is examined as a mainly Greek phenomenon (there are few Latin equivalents) that was characteristic of both pagan and Christian literature. The material investigated falls within two categories: fictional letter collections from well-known authors of the Second Sophistic and their successors (Lucian, Alciphron, Philostratus, Aristaenetus); l...
John Lydus and the Roman Past offers a new interpretation of the emergence of Byzantine society as viewed through the eyes of John Lydus, a sixth-century scholar and civil servant. Maas show that control of classical inheritance was politically contested in the reign of Justinian. He demonstrates how the past could be used to convey legitimacy and social definition at a time of profound change.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.